Does prayer really affect things or
is it just a bunch of phony baloney?

By Spencer Kittelson

Date: October 11, 2001

"Is there a supernatural?" is one of the most fundamental
questions we each have to answer for ourselves from our experiences and
understanding of the world and universe we live in. If the answer is no we have
little if any room for the concept of God or gods or anything other than brutal,
mechanistic cause/ effect and chance. An affirmative answer provides for an
essentially infinite variety of philosophical positions, beliefs and forms of
mysticism. Of course, a few would object to the mere term "supernatural" and
would argue that everything is "natural", even if we don't understand it, can't
measure it or get reproducable test results while studying a phenomena. In my
opinion, if it cannot even begin to be explained by any known science or
physics, it is by definition metaphysical or more commonly, supernatural.

For many there is overwhelming anecdotal evidence of some
form of metaphysics, supernatural, spiritual realm, etc., yet there is little if
any real scientific data to back up such a position.
In this
study of prayer dramatically influencing in vitro fertilization results we
find a very interesting example of how statistical science is showing that
something is really there and that it is inexplicable by any known physics. This
is not the only study to show a strong positive correlation between focused
prayer and unusual outcomes but is merely a very recent one.